The word 'forwarder' is correct and usable in written English.
It is mainly used in business contexts to refer to a person or company which arranges the transportation of goods from one place to another. For example, "The goods will be picked up from the supplier by the forwarder and delivered to our warehouse."
The Swiss company developed as a freight forwarder, which means it arranges for other companies' goods to be carried by other companies' ships.
As a freight forwarder, K+N sees its future as offering a broad range of supply-chain services.Others have the same ambition, including many of the express operators.
You may not know how to ship a product from, say, Bangladesh to Barbados, but there will be a freight forwarder or express-delivery firm that does.
It has already become a big air-freight forwarder and also operates road and rail services.
Shippers usually want an end-to-end solution; although paying a logistics firm or freight forwarder to provide it may cost them a bit more than they would pay in an open auction, the overall savings on hassle often make it worthwhile.Nor are all freight carriers as alike as they might seem.
As a port operator, stevedore, warehouser and freight forwarder, Bolloré handles 80% of west Africa's exports (excluding oil) and 25% of east Africa's in short, nearly all of Africa's cotton and cocoa, as well as much of its coffee, rubber, and timber.With offices in 42 African countries and 20,000 of his 31,000 employees based in Africa, Mr Bolloré is bullish on the continent's prospects.
This summer the government attempted to get the shipper to swallow Sino-Trans, China's biggest freight-forwarder, an operation viewed with contempt by COSCO's senior managers.
"It may cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day to operate a big container ship," one freight-forwarder I spoke with said.
As the freight-forwarder explained it, there's a chicken-and-egg problem: the Asian carriers won't call without a big distribution center nearby to insure a steady demand for traffic, and companies such as Wal-Mart don't build distribution centers unless the Asian shippers serve the port nearby.
Nowadays firms ranging from trucking companies to freight forwarders, shipping lines, air-cargo carriers and post offices are more likely to use the word "logistics" to describe what they do.Logistics is a military term.
America's Certified Cargo Screening Programme makes shippers, forwarders and manufacturers take responsibility for their part of the supply chain.
